Music

Monday, January 18, 2016

The SLIFR Movie Treehouse is a place where I like to gather a few of my
movie-writing pals and exchange long e-mails on the way the movies shaped up
for us in the year just left behind. It’s been a few years since I’ve
undertaken this project, but the time felt right again, so I invited the very
talented critical voices of Brian Doan, Odie Henderson, Marya Murphy and Phil
Dyess-Nugent to take part over the last week, and to my great happiness they all agreed.

Of course, you can find all these pieces in their entirety by scrolling down this blog page, but I was so excited by what they all wrote for this project that I wanted to create a sort of digest with excerpts and quick links to the individual articles.

So then, what follows here are samples from the 16 posts we submitted
over the week of January 11-17, the tip of the iceberg of a week-long conversation that barely exposed the tip of the iceberg of possible conversations about the movies of 2015. We could have gone on for a couple more weeks, but we'd all have either died of exhaustion or given up our day lives to take up permanent residence in the Treehouse.

I've rarely enjoyed being so thoroughly outclassed. These folks are all terrific, witty, passionate and honest writers. I hope you enjoy this sampling of what we were up to last week.

“Having spent several year-end seasons isolated in my own
opinions, I felt like being sociable again. So I sent out invitations to four
of my favorite film commenters to breathe life within the rickety walls of the
Treehouse once again, and to my great delight they all accepted. Two of them
already have official outlets for their film writing. The other two are writers
whose work I first became familiar with through the august efforts of the
Muriel Awards, then followed chiefly via their witty and wise commentary on
Facebook. And all four I consider friends even though, as is increasingly often
the case in the world of blogging and of Zuckerberg-influenced social
interaction, none of us have actually met in person. What we’re going to undertake here over the
course of the next week (and maybe, depending on stamina levels, slightly
beyond) is basically an exchange of correspondence in which we will engage each
other on the subject of the year in movies—our favorites, our least favorites,
disturbing and encouraging trends, hopes for the future, and just about
anything else that created a blip on our radar as we spent time gazing at the
silver screen, or our laptops and tablets and phones, absorbing the range of cinematic offerings
available to us. Rather than trying to convince anyone, least of all ourselves,
that the Treehouse represents some sort of carving out of a Supreme Court of
film scholars, I’m envisioning a series of exchanges that will emphasize the
way our personalities and tastes interact and feed off one another—those
looking for the unleashing of nasty barbs and blood in the water will probably
be disappointed. I’m really looking forward to seeing what we come up with, and
if you spent a serious amount of time with the movies of 2015—would you be
reading this if you hadn’t?—I hope you’ll enjoy your time eavesdropping in the
Treehouse as much as we will hanging out up there."

“I live in Oberlin, a small Ohio college
town that's about an hour or so (weather and traffic depending) from art-houses
in Cleveland and 30 minutes or so from multiplexes in nearby towns. We have one
theater, with two screens, which alternate out films about every two weeks or
so (give or take—The Force Awakens is
in its third week, while Sisters had
the good sense to slink out of town after seven days). While it's not quite
Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms hanging out at the Royal in The Last Picture Show, this isolation,
combined with the limited viewing time created by day jobs, does mean that I'm
often behind on things my big-city friends are chatting about on Twitter.

When the Ebert site asked its contributors
for their Top Ten lists, I prefaced mine by addressing this supposed quandary;
I guess I felt like it was something that needed to be addressed (a
social/cinephile anxiety which certainly says something about me, and maybe
about current trends/pressures of talking about films in a tiered movie economy
whose discourses are shaped by geography as much as anything). Here's what I
said, shared to give y'all (and those who read it at the blog) a sense of where
I'm coming from:

There was a long period when I was bothered
by the difficulties that my geographic location presented to my staying in
touch with current films; I think I even felt weirdly ‘guilty’ about it, as if
being out of the loop meant being away from my ‘real’ movie-going self. But
now, I think of it as an odd advantage: it gives me a lot to look forward to,
freedom from whatever suffocating cliquishness might exist in bigger cities,
and a perspective whose skewed nature (relative to everyone else’s) means that
whatever else my viewing habits are, they are mine to take responsibility for
and enjoy. As Roland Barthes said, ‘My body is different than yours.’ Or, in
the words of Malcolm, the lead character of Dope
(one of my favorite films of the year): ‘I don’t fit in. I used to think that
was a curse, but I’m slowly starting to see, that maybe, it is a blessing.’"

“I know that watching movies on watches and
phones is de rigeuer, but I find the entire concept to be de trop. (You work
those French lessons, boy!) I can’t watch squat on my Android, but I am guilty
of laptop viewing. In my defense, I have a TV sized monitor on this laptop when
I’m home. Part of the critic’s life is dealing with the wonderful movie
delivery system known as an online screener. These screeners run about as
quickly as a stoned turtle, and have watermarks in the least convenient places
(once the watermark covered the subtitles, forcing me to work those French
lessons, boy!). Once, it took me 13 hours to watch a movie I had to review.
Unfortunately, that movie was The
Stanford Prison Experiment, #7 on my 2015 ten worst list. So I try to get
out to a theater to see most movies. It’s my preferred method of watching a
movie, even if I have to do it in a critic’s screening room that feels like a
mausoleum.

For now, though, let us join our fellow
cinephiles for a moment of silence to mourn the death of cinema.

Just kidding! Cinema has been dead and
resurrected so much that even Jesus is rolling His eyes. I’ve never understood
this woe-is-me phenomenon put on every other year by whiny-ass think-piece
writers. Cinema, like rock ‘n roll, will never die. If TV didn’t kill it, it
will last forever.”

“2015 was a terrific
year for small movies that burrowed deep into private obsessions and cultish
passions, illuminating out-of-the-way pockets of experience and people who have
waited a long time for the chance to be treated as equal partners in the pop
culture mainstream. The emergence of movies like Sean S. Baker'sTangerine is an inspiring
story, but having lived through the 1990s, I don't want to oversell the whole ‘creative
spirits from the fringes of society are coming for your multiplex!’ aspect of
it. I'm old enough to remember when the ‘plucky outsider with minimal resources
crashing the studio gates’ story of the year wasEl Mariachi, and at the end of
the day, it's possible that the big lesson of Robert Rodriguez's career is that
there are people you maybe shouldn't encourage. Of course, the big difference
now is that talented outsiders may not have any interest in even finding their
way to the studio gate unless they have a belly full of beer and are itching to
unzip. Baker's movie was midwifed by the Duplass brothers, bless them, who have
gone from making movies that often look like overextended TV skits to creating
an HBO TV series that plays like the world's longest, whitest indie movie.Tangerine blows the pants
off most of the Bros.'s oeuvre, but it's still kind of weird watching a movie
that was shot on a phone that is, in turn, fated to be watched by people
looking for something to stare at on their phones.”

“When I say I don’t really watch movies anymore, I
should clarify that, yes, okay, I watch a hell of a lot more movies than most
middle-aged mother-types. But the person I see myself as, the person who spent
all day at the multiplex sneaking from theater to theater, who spent most of
her young adult birthdays alone in movie theaters, who only went ‘shopping’ if
there was a movie theater in the mall, who pre-ordered the first Roku box and
dove headlong into the joy of Netflix streaming… I dunno. I dunno where she
went.

Okay, I kind of know. My movie-watching and movie-making got tangled up in my
head with a marriage that ended. A series of crappy things in the early
twenty-teens estranged me from the filmmaking and film-writing communities. It
all became fraught. And being a full-time working nearly full-time parenting
human is kind of exhausting. But I have time. Man, I haveplenty of time. And every
freaking time I go inside an actual movie theater, I slip down in my seat,
Coca-Cola fizzing next to me, the house lights go down and the screen flutters
and I’m ecstatic. And I think, ‘Why am I notalways in
a movie theater?’

I can’t watch movies at home anymore. I mean, I can, but it’s an effort. I have
to stop myself from jumping up to start a load of laundry or check my damned
phone or let the neighbor’s cat in or let the neighbor’s cat out or playSimpsons Tapped Outon the iPad or maybe do a jigsaw
puzzle or chat with five people on Facebook or take a bath which turns into a
nap. I can watch TV shows. Episode after episode after episode. 22-44 minutes
at a shot. Endless loop. But movies, man. That’s a commitment.

Shoot, I just realized what it is. It’s the same thing
that happens if I drive more than 30 minutes. I start thinking. And feeling.
And that’s just not acceptable. In the movie theater, where it’s a wholly
absorbing experience, I can fall into it completely. At home… it’s dangerous.
Feeling and thinking are the enemies of sanity for me these days.”

“I took my daughter to see Hitchcock/Truffaut, which was followed by a midnight screening of Psycho, which she had never seen. (She’s
a 15-year-old movie fan with a strong attraction to the classics of the horror
genre.) I asked her before going in how much she knew about the 1960 movie
landmark and preemptively mourned the fact that, because we were seeing the doc
first, Psycho’s element of surprise
would likely be ruined for her. She said she knew about the shower scene, but
that was about it. And I was relieved when Kent Jones’ documentary, other than
using a shot of Arbogast reeling backward down the stairs in its opening
moments, carried discussion of Psycho
itself only as far as that shower scene. (Nonetheless, she viewed most of that
section of the doc with her ears and eyes partially covered.) After the movie
let out, as we were heading back out to buy our tickets for Psycho, I asked for her thoughts and she
said, ‘Well, I tried to cover my eyes and ears, but I saw some of it (the
shower scene) anyway. Oh, well. So I know how the movie ends, but there’s
probably a lot of scary stuff leading up to that, right?....’ Ka-ching!
Surprise factor preserved! She spent the last half of the movie in a glorious
state of nervous wreck-titude and had no idea what was coming when Vera Miles
opens the door to the fruit cellar. One of the great movie moments of the year
for me, and for her too, judging by our 2:00 AM discussion on the ride home.”

“Regarding Coogler’s
subversive pivoting of the (Rocky)
franchise: It’s important how and why he did it. Hollywood simply does not
accept the notion that white male audiences will accept and embrace a hero who
is a minority or female. And considering all the screaming and clothes-rending
that went on vis-à-vis the colorization and/or feminine invasion of the Star Wars and superhero franchises, I
can’t say I blame Hollywood for thinking this way. Coogler knows the series
runs through the Rocky character, so he needs to give him a storyline for the Rocky fans. But it’s a rope-a-dope on
the order of the similar switcheroo in Sirk’s version of Imitation of Life. This soapy, yet effective Rocky storyline is a front for the real story of Adonis Creed’s
ascension to the status of new torchbearer/hero. Coogler knows that to have the
audience acceptance required to make his remix work, he’ll have to use Rocky
the way other movies use a Sidekick Negro character. Except unlike those
characters, Rocky has a backstory and an arc. And Stallone does a great job.

More importantly, for all his love of
Rocky’s character, Coogler gets to engage in some childhood wish-fulfillment
with his new hero, which I immediately picked up on and embraced. He even cops
to it in the film visually, with those scenes of young brown faces looking at
Adonis with admiration and hope. I’d never seen that in a movie in 43 years of
attending the cinema. I wish I had seen this movie when I was a kid.”

“I
remember when Pauline Kael's first collected edition of her ‘movie notes’ from The New Yorker came out in 1983, it
included a little note advising the reader that if you watch a great movie on a
TV set--even if it's on LaserDisc!--you are, and I'm quoting from memory,
committing an aesthetic crime of which you are the victim. That passage was
conspicuously missing from later editions of the book, proving that one of the
first things that people usually bring up when they're explaining why Pauline
Kael was the Antichrist isn't true: she DID once change her mind about
something! Or at least backslid on a point of principle when she realized there
was no other way she was going to get her grandson to sit still through Seven Samurai.

I'm very grateful for the technological
innovations that have resulted in an explosion in viewing choices and given
small-time filmmakers a shot at broadening their audience without having to
drive from one college campus to the next with a film print in the trunk of
their car. (It's certainly been a boom for documentary filmmakers, and in the
past several months streamers have had the chance to sample excellent new docs
about Amy Winehouse and Nina Simone and Janis Joplin, the Black Panther party,
and Marlon Brando, Crystal Moselle's mind-boggling The Wolfpack, Alex Gibney's triple bill of Scientology, Sinatra,
and Steve Jobs, and Albert Maysles's wonderful, high-spirited memento mori, Iris.) But I also miss the feeling I
used to have that, however flawed and homogenized movie culture was, those of
us who cared to do the spadework could still get our arms around it, get a
clear sense of what it encompassed and who was being clearly left out and where
to find the pockets of activity that might speak most directly to a moviegoer's
individual needs outside the blockbuster mainstream. It might even have been
easier in those days for a critic to discover a deserving movie that the
mainstream was turning its back on, like Carl Franklin's One False Move, and beat the drums for it.”

“Ah, Jennifer Lawrence... I know she is a
virtually untouchable figure these days-- Deadspin's
Drew Magary made a joke a year or two ago that even breathing a hint that she
might not be All That would cause a person to be sent to a remote detention
facility by the internet Powers That Be--but at the risk of excommunication,
I'm afraid I have to dissent from Phil's call for an ‘amen’ on her status as ‘the
single solitary person doing the most to keep the art form alive while carrying
an entire industry on her back.’ I'm pretty sure Jennifer Lawrence actually
exists (to paraphrase what the late Ralph Nader* once said of the Reagans'
racist appeal to white Democrats) to make Hollywood feel better about its
ageism, and to let the rest of us be amused by their unacknowledged ironies.
Her fellow stars can cheer her on while wearing their various ribbons at the
Globes or the Oscars, without feeling awkward about how much of the 'dramatic'
career they're celebrating (I don't know whether I was more moved by her
ACTING! in the terrifying ‘exploding microwave’ scene in American Hustle or the ‘I can TOO chew scenery better than De Niro!
And in the same scene!’ moments in Silver
Linings Playbook) is based on repeatedly giving 40-something roles to a
twenty-something with box office pull. That this is occurring while Lawrence is
currently burnishing her ‘I've got a great bullshit detector’ persona in
interviews and solipsistic Lennypieces proves that finding a career path through maudlin
manipulation didn’t die with Stallone’s stardom.”

“Yes, we pay movie stars exorbitant
amounts, but we kinda think it’s a scam. We’ll fall in love with actors, but we
don’t take them seriously. After all, an actor without a script can be a
terrifying thing. There are very few actors (mostly just the comedians who write) who can go off script and sound
vaguely intelligent. Movie stars are lucky. They’re pretty. They’re at best
savants of some sort. Our careful and closed intellectual brains can’t quite
process what it is that makes them magic.
So let me tell you what it is. Hell, I don’t know. Wait, yes, I do. It’s magic. It’s the soul. It’s the exquisite
pain of existence poured out in little ice cube trays for your convenient
consumption. You hear about a temperamental asshole actor lashing out with
crazy petulance and fury at a grip who interrupted a scene, and you feel all
superior because you would never lose
your temper like that. Consider that the temperamental asshole actor’s job is
to tear down every single fucking wall and coping skill and barrier she or he
has in order to flay him or herself in front of an audience, the camera, the
world, so that you can feel a little something as you watch in the theater, on
your television, or on your pocket computing wonder. And when you question the
bat-shit choices, addictions, love affairs, acts of public indecency of your
cinematic heroes, remember that they’re feeling every second of every day the
most vicious, tender, tragic, terrifying, exquisite feelings you’ve ever felt.
Every second. All of the feels. Again,
I don’t know where I’m going with this, except perhaps to say it’s amazing to
me that they’re not all constantly numbed out of their noggins with every
possible drug, drink and sexual escapade they can muster.”

“As much as I (unexpectedly) enjoyed his performance, Sylvester Stallone’s
supporting actor nomination, incredibly Creed’s
sole recognition, has to register as bittersweet. No Ryan Coogler? No
Michael B. Jordan? No Creed for Best
Picture, something I thought up until about 5:40 a.m. was as sure a thing as
could be anticipated? But nothing. And
on Carl Weathers’ 68th birthday too. I get that Creed’s reception by the Academy, the nameless, faceless,
lacking-in-actual-corporeality ‘they,’ has been up to this point and continues
to be largely a pretext for the coronation of Stallone’s Balboa character, one that
began in earnest in 1976 and got derailed by the actor’s cosmos-dwarfing ego,
ghastly tendency to mold and relentlessly ride the political zeitgeist of
Reagan-era jingoism and subterranean storytelling skills over the last 38
years. But the lack of recognition for the movie, in the screenplay category at
the very least, speaks more tellingly
to an overall tendency of the Academy to muffle considerations of race, even
when it’s an integral part of the story of a film they seemed primed to
celebrate, 12 Years a Slave being the
exception to the rule that most easily pacifies those who choose not to
acknowledge the bigger, more troubling picture. (Of course, the year’s best,
prickliest, most challenging movie on race and American society, Chi-raq, never stood a chance of getting
within a 10-mile perimeter surrounding the Kodak Theater in Hollywood.) In this
light, Straight Outta Compton’s lone
nomination, for its Caucasian screenwriters, by the way, unfortunately ends up
looking more like tokenism than tribute. A peek at the way the votes actually
tallied might dispel at least some of the unease. But in a year that featured
Michael B. Jordan, Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac, Teyvonah Parris, Jennifer
Hudson, Benicio Del Toro and Chiwetel Ejiofor in high-profile roles, to name
only a few, the fact that the closest any actor of color came to a nomination
was Jordan and Thompson hanging out somewhere in the vicinity of Stallone’s
admittedly effective turn, or Samuel L. Jackson sweating it out in the same
big, wide, claustrophobic room as
Jennifer Jason Leigh while she snarled the N-word, is a bit harder to swallow
than it might have been otherwise.”

"(In Straight Outta Compton) (t)he early stuff about Dr. Dre and the
formation of the group, the material with Ice Cube and his solo career, the
insights into the business side of their lives-- I thought that stuff was
fascinating. The recording scenes were great, and so were the recreations of
live performances. But the tendency in any biopic to say "...and nothing
was ever the same again," especially when it works to isolate the group as
a singularity (rather than part of a broader moment of hip-hop's flourishing,
increased politicization, and growing stylistic diversity) felt wrong to me. I
know it's about one group, in one period (just as Love & Mercy, which has its own fraught relationship to the
biopic, also is), but the larger claims it wants to make might have worked
better for me if we got more acknowledgement of musical context than one scene
of Ice Cube recording with the Bomb Squad.

It's actually a movie that got smaller in
my imagination the more time passed, because as I turned it over in my head, I
couldn't buy into the movie's paradoxical braggadocio about NWA's political
stances, and its repeated insistence that "no one else is doing this"
(which, having grown up with Public Enemy, the Native Tongues collective, and
Boogie Down Productions, all of whom were also doing varied and genuinely
radical work contemporaneous/near-contemporaneous with the 1988 Straight Outta Compton album, clearly
ain't so; it works as a character aside, but the film also wants it as its
motto, even placing Chuck D's famous line about rap as a black CNN in the
group's collective mouth). I also wasn't sure what to do with its ambivalent
take on the group's relationship to violence, which I thought it could never
decide if it was celebrating or condemning (although, in fairness, The Chronic itself--which we see the
genesis of in the film's second half--also wrestles with this kind of
ambivalence)."

“I didn’t see any Brando-level performances
this year, but I do think that Jennifer Lawrence, more supernaturally alive
than just about anybody onscreen, has shown an amazing gift for playing
clear-eyed, passionate heroes who won’t back down, whether they’re bent on
toppling a dictatorship or selling a mop, and this year she’ll turn the same
age Brando was when he made his first movie. There were, as they say on the
infomercials, some amazing discoveries: Daisy Ridley in you-know-what, Britt
Robertson in Brad Bird’s overly maligned epic bomb Tomorrowland, Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor in Tangerine, Shameik Moore and the other
young performers in Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope.
Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina and The Man from UNCLE, Rebecca Ferguson in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Nadia
Hilker in Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s genre-bending horror romance Spring, which also boasts a wonderful
performance by Lou Taylor Pucci as an American in Italy whose emotional state
shades gratefully from PYSD to lovestruck. (It’s sort of like Before Sunrise with tentacles.) In Brooklyn, Saorise Ronan grows up
onscreen, transforming herself from a painfully shy fish out of water into a
confident woman of the world; she made me feel as if I were finally seeing the
performance I read about whenever Jessica Chastain plays a young earth mother.
Dakota Johnson gives an irresistible star performance in Fifty Shades of Grey, without a shred of help from her material,
director, or co-star. (The fact that she’s right there with them on the list of
Razzies nominees is a terrible indictment of what indulging in kneejerk,
unreflective mockery of officially certified bad movies does to the brain.)”

“(Meryl) Streep said that today’s film
criticism was sorely lacking in female voices, which is true. In my younger
days, I read so many female critics: Pauline Kael, Judith Crist, Kathleen
Carroll, Susan Wloszczyna, Sheila Benson, etc., in addition to Roger and Archer
Winsten and even Sexy Rexy. I hadn’t even realized that the universe had
changed and become so male. So I agree with Meryl.

But in addition to this, I add that we need
more diverse voices of color in film criticism as well. We’re both pretty
fucked, unfortunately: The consensus is that women will only give good reviews
to Nancy Meyers movies and can’t sit through The Revenant (my mother watches Lucio Fulci movies, so fuck whoever
thinks this about women). And I can’t tell you how often people are surprised
that I know about things besides Black movies. I was talking about 8½ at a party and someone said “GASP!
You know about Fellini?” I responded, “You do know Fellini was Black, right?
Billy Wilder too! He was passing!”

When that’s not happening, people mistake
me for the only Black critic they’ve heard of, Armond White. Now, I’ve met
Armond, and he’s probably far more insulted that I’m being mistaken for him
than the other way around.

My point here is that diversity matters in
the arts and in criticism, and not the fake-ass diversity bullshit I keep
getting fed that’s been manufactured by the same PR firm that created
“post-racial America.” True diversity, because the current "diverse"
situation is predominantly White, predominantly male and totally bullshit. I
like exploring the viewpoints of those who aren’t like me, because I may learn
something I didn’t know. Why shouldn’t readers or viewers also experience the
viewpoints of LGBT people, or women, or people of color?”

“So. The Oscars. Oh, man, you guys. I love the Oscars in
all their absurdity. Of course I want my favorite actors and films to be
nominated and to win. But what other awards in the world do we feel like we
have so much stake in? The movies are ours. We own them. Actors and directors
belong to us. They are our royalty and our property. Who won Best Advancement
in Cancer Research in 2006? I dunno. Probably some old white guy. But The New World was freakin’ robbed. Crash? Seriously?

I hope the Oscars will eventually go the
way of most professional sports. It’ll be only black people who win anything or
are nominated. Because, dude, come on. Who wants to see pasty white people
emoting? But, nah, as long as we are a mostly white establishment we’ll want to
see people like us and we’ll
appreciate the performances of people like us
and stories like ours. Actual talent
be damned. The world is rigged. It is getting better. Maybe. It’s just sooooo
goddamned slow. And when the black, brown, gay, female talents come along,
well… there’s only room for one at a time. Look, guys, we gavethat Hurt Locker
chick some awards, like, just a couple of years ago. We often nominate one or
two black people. What more do you want from
us? Now you’re just trying to take away spots from the nice white men who
deserve them. Maybe we can split up the awards. We have actor and actress. How
about director and directress? Director and Directress of Color? LGBT special
consideration awards. The Special Oscars. Honestly, the entertainment industry
is better for non-white people than most industries in this silly planet. I
work for a law firm with 65 partners. About 55 of them are, yeah, you know--
straight, white men. I want this conversation to be louder and broader. We are
a racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, able-ist species. Let’s try to be
better.”

“Where
once there was jittery disregard for visual coherence in Inarritu’s films,
there is now an attempt to wed the visual element in his films to the way
people in his films experience the world, which is, I think, a far cry from
writing off Inarritu’s intent as an effort to reduce the American frontier of
the 1830’s recreated in his new movieto
a first-person shooter game environment. Objections like the ones Brian
raises—`a
bullying assault on its audience, a macho dare to dislike it and therefore be
out of the loop’-- seem rooted in resistance to a perceived tactic that wouldn’t be out of
line with Inarritu’s directorial past, but one which I’m not convinced is
entirely fairly applied here. (This is not Gaspar Noe’s The Revenant, after all, and thank God for that.) There is a
certain level of verisimilitude that comes with the territory of telling a
story like this, one which has been cherry-picked by Hollywood before, by the
way, most notably in the 1971 Richard Harris epic Man in the Wilderness. But I never sensed, as Brian clearly did,
that I was being put through the ringer by an expert sadist for the dirty
thrill of it—for that privilege see instead The
Hateful Eight, if you must—or that the movie’s ‘grunting antics’ were ‘art
house porn for people who wouldn’t be caught dead at a Peckinpah or Don Siegel
retrospective.’”

*************************************

Thanks
again to Brian, Marya, Odie and Phil for spending time with me in the SLIFR
Treehouse talking about movies. Hope they’re ready to climb back up that
rickety ladder next year, because I already am.

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Does
this piss you all off the way it does me? There’s a very presumptive ad running on TV right now—it’s for iPhones or the
Siri experience or some such hypnotic shit—that kind of sums up the dark side
of the whole How The Way We Watch Movies Is Changing thing, and it doesn’t have
nearly as much to do with the size of the screens as with the attitude of the
soft brains behind the eyes staring at them. During a 30-second bombardment of
evidence meant to suggest just how fulfilling the experience with your iPhone
can be, an intertitle on screen pops up which reads: “Siri, find the
best sci-fi movies.” This is followed by a shot of Keir Dullea from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is then rapidly
followed by another intertitle: “Only the new ones.” This is followed by
several shots from The Martian.

Surely the intent is to impress us with the iPhone’s ability to reach all the way back to 1968 to find a
possible candidate for filling the distraction void in the phone addict’s
experience, but all I can think about is how ads like these shape the
perceptions of the (young) people toward whom they’re most aggressively
pitched. Is it any wonder little Johnny and Debbie don’t give two shits about
Keir Dullea? They’re practically being told not to.

These
thoughts were swirling in my head right about the same time that I read Phil’s
noting of the 40th anniversary of Jaws, which premiered during the summer of 1975, and how
Spielberg’s movie has lost absolutely none of its precociously masterful
ability to do unto audiences what it damn well pleases. I took my kids to see
it in a local movie palace here in Glendale the summer before last, and though
their knees weren’t reduced to jelly the way mine were when I saw it way back
in the Pleistocene, it still knocked ‘em for a loop. (I recently found that the
effect of another great horror movie, The
Texas Chain Saw Massacre, released one year earlier in 1974, has remained
undiluted, but the kids haven’t seen that one yet!)

There
was another movie in 1975 that I’d say, without fear of hyperbole, changed my
life, and it did so in a much sneakier way than Jaws did. I saw Nashville for the first time when I
was 15 years old, the same age my oldest daughter is right now, and not only
was it not “the damnedest thing I’ve ever saw,” I didn’t know what the hell it was. So of course I
didn’t “like” it. But that movie followed me around. All the folks I ran into
in the film department where I based my college studies seemed to be big Altman
heads—one of the teaching assistants seemed to throw the term “Altmanesque”
around as often as she used “the” or “and.” I saw it three more times and
continued to dislike it.

But by the fourth time I’d managed to live a little more life and the movie’s
loose-limbed rhythms suddenly began to speak to me. Nashville, and a whole passel of other great movies the experience
of opening myself up to Altman’s world allowed me to appreciate, changed the
way I looked at movies, the way I permitted myself to receive them. Even now, after 38 years and God knows
how many viewings-- 25? 30?-- the movie catches me off guard and thrills me in
new ways with its vision of a world where optimism and defeat are mutually
exclusive but can often coexist in the same moment, making meaning with each
new apprehensive breath.

So when I
see that damn iPhone ad, I can’t help but wonder if 15-year-olds in 2015 will
have the same opportunity to have their worlds shaken up by a movie like Jaws or Nashville, whether it’s possible for them to be open, in a world of
so many distractions and options for staving off boredom, to the possibilities
that a great movie can offer. Last January I took my 15-year-old (who was
technically 14 at the time) to see The
Godfather at a theater in downtown Los Angeles, and she’s obsessed with the
movie now—she’s seen it two more times since and owns the annotated screenplay.
It’s the least I can do.

As
for this year, there’s something creepy and depressing aboutThe Revenant’s instant coronation as the
Oscar front-runner and imagining all the endless hype and “analysis” by the
Oscar prognostication crowd over the next month and a half, designed to squeeze
as much air out of what fun the contest itself might have to offer, including
any lingering notions of Oscar-night surprises.

That’s to say nothing of the Academy’s lily-white nominations as a whole, which
say more to me about what Hollywood is putting out there in general than it
does the Academy’s ability to discern quality that crosses racial boundaries.
In any hypothetical year where there were, say, 50% more films made and
populated by people of color, the Academy would probably still get it mostly
wrong. But the movies have to be there to begin with, and not just ones like Creed which offer up a ton of
African-American talent alongside a ripe opportunity for that talent to be
eclipsed come award time.The Los Angeles Times offers up cries for
diversity around Oscar time, but they should be front and center year round
when it comes to campaigning Hollywood to shake up its value system and start
telling stories from the fresher perspectives of the diverse community by which
it is surrounded.

Getting
back to The Revenant, though it’s
hardly a personal cause—the movie landed somewhere around #27 on my year-end
list-- I have to say I liked it a whole
lot better than Odie, and certainly Brian did. It feels weird to me to find myself
in the position of defending one of Alejandro G. “Ayotitoo”’s movies. I’ve
never been a fan of this director’s desperation to be taken seriously,
especially in his earlier pictures like Amores
Perros, 21 Grams and Babel, all
of which stirred up pessimistic moralism inside of a swirling pot of messy
chronology (for the post-Tarantino new world, I guess), aggressively annoying,
fashionably jittery mise-en-scene and, of course, lots of random,
rub-your-privileged-nose-in-it violence.

And
though I was primed to hate Birdman
based on my reaction to Inarritu’s previously dizzying levels of pretension, I
found it to be a troubled, imperfect sort of marvel, and I can’t help but think
that, in setting himself the challenge of the film’s illusory, one-take
strategy, he constructed a movie that was, at least in part, an answer to those
of us hated his movies because we couldn’t recall a single image of distinction
from his oeuvre-- all that seemed to
remain in the memory from, say, Babel,
was storytelling nonsense whose images were reduced to the equivalent of
shattered glass—too many reflections, no resonance.

Where
once there was jittery disregard for visual coherence in Inarritu’s films,
there is now an attempt to wed the visual element in his films to the way people
in his films experience the world, which is, I think, a far cry from writing
off Inarritu’s intent as an effort to reduce the American frontier of the
1830’s recreated in his new movieinto
a first-person shooter game environment. Objections like the ones Brian
raises—“a
bullying assault on its audience, a macho dare to dislike it and therefore be
out of the loop”-- seem rooted in resistance to a perceived tactic that wouldn’t be out of
line with Inarritu’s directorial past, but one which I’m not convinced is
entirely fairly applied here. (This is not Gaspar Noe’s The Revenant, after all, and thank God for that.) There is a
certain level of verisimilitude that comes with the territory of telling a
story like this, one which has been cherry-picked by Hollywood before, by the
way, most notably in the 1971 Richard Harris epic Man in the Wilderness. But I never sensed, as Brian clearly did,
that I was being put through the ringer by an expert sadist for the dirty
thrill of it—for that privilege see instead The
Hateful Eight, if you must—or that the movie’s “grunting antics” were “art
house porn for people who wouldn’t be caught dead at a Peckinpah or Don Siegel
retrospective.”

Maybe
it’s Inarritu’s technical mastery itself that some people object to, that
causes suspicion as to his motives. Phil wrote in his last post, “A director
who concentrates on perfecting a visual style or establishing total control at
the expense of using the actors as full collaborators—I would name cite Kubrick
and recent Malick as cautionary examples—does so at his peril.” Inarritu may indeed end up
becoming one of those directors for whom the composing of an image, or the
constructing of a sequence according to a rigorous technical choreography,
eclipses the need for true collaboration between himself and his actors. He’s
not exactly got what I would call a warm approach, but I don’t think he’s in
the Remote Aesthete club yet either, if the juice secreted from the likes of
Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough and Lindsey
Duncan in Birdman, or Leonardo
DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter and Forrest Goodluck in The Revenant is any true indication.

Of
course there isn’t a movie with so much as a pinky toe dipped in history that
even comes close to any meaningful representation of “historical accuracy,” no
matter how hard the idea gets chased. I’d also suggest that a movie like The Revenant’s not being held to the
same rigorous, nitpicky standards of “historical accuracy” as something like Straight Outta Compton has as much to do
with modernity versus the distant past as it does with racism. Surprise,
surprise—a lot of people’s perspectives are noticeably narrow. If the movie is
set in the distant past and not within spitting distance of our immediate
experience, or a setting in which the experience might be more immediate, I’m
guessing most people would be less quick to start snooping around for
anachronisms and other representative deficiencies. (The level of anger Odie
characterizes as being part and parcel of Straight
Outta Compton’s dramatic strategy may have caused some to duck for cover
and push the movie away too.)

At
the very least, if marketing wizards are going to continue to insist on shoving
“Based on a True Story” or “Based on Actual Events” down our throats, we ought
to be capable of adopting enough smarts to understand that what’s on the screen
rarely has much to do with what may have happened in real life. The act of
dramatization itself is fibbing for effect, and The Revenant is well acquainted with the practice—just compare its
grueling last act, in which Di Caprio, playing real-life survivor Hugh Glass, finally catches up with Tom Hardy and
goes mano-a-mano with the man who did him wrong, with the somewhat less than
rousing finish to the events as they actually transpired, and then imagine Inarritu and his screenwriter
enthusiastically approving that official version for their film.

Okay,
before I allow myself to rattle on any further, let me pay a little attention
to the questions I posed in my last post before I begin readying the Treehouse
to be shuttered for another year.

Like
Brian, I have a great love for Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy’s “Moments
Out of Time” a piece that used to be published annually in the pages of Film Comment in which the two critics
would poetically recall some of the year’s most indelible movie moments. I
cannot claim Jameson and Murphy’s brand of eloquence, but I offer these moments
remembered from 2015 anyway.

Room: Boy meets dog, and also the first time we meet Leo, who Boy (and we)
size up suspiciously—he’s got that look—an understandable prejudice which turns
out to be completely unfounded.

Chi-raq: Sam Jackson’s introduction of Lysistrata, with accompanying visuals,
the Chi-lites sequence, Nick Cannon’s opening rap (with lyrics), but most of
all, the impassioned, enraged words of John Cusack as Father Mike Corridan,
based on Chicago’s Father Michael Pfleger, presiding over the funeral of a little
girl murdered in the streets.

Phoenix:Nina
Hoss, in bandages, and much later sidling up to the piano to finally sing Kurt
Weill’s “Speak Low,” the movie ending of the year.

Gett: The Trial
of Viviane Amsalem: Increasingly frustrated by the lopsided rabbinical
judgment favoring any male voice and stomping on her own, Viviane comes to a courtroom
session wearing red shoes, exposing her ankles.

Meru: the story of nomadic climber Renan Ozturk.

Mad Max: Fury
Road: A movie so loaded with “favorite moments” that, after five viewings,
I doubt I’ve even seen them all. I’ll pick one: Max’s “thumbs up” regard to
Angharad (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) just before her awful exit.

Spotlight: the final confrontation between Boston
Globe editor Michael Keaton and Catholic lawyer Jamey Sheridan, and a
coffee shop conversation between Rachel McAdams (sympathetically listening,
never telegraphing hers, or our, expected reactions) and a grown-up victim
(Michael Cyril Creighton) whose confessions of adolescent homosexuality were
supported and then exploited by an abusive priest.

Best of Enemies: the account of the fallout from the exchange of insults
(”Crypto-nazi!” “Queer!”) between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal on national
television, and the quiet pall that settles on the film as it begins to reflect
forward on the effect of the debate along the medium’s timeline.

Mustang: the odd, almost resigned reaction to a sudden, loud sound as a family
prepares for an arranged marriage; later a reunion between teacher and
students.

An Honest Liar: James Randi’s fascinating account of the exposure of an evangelical
faith-healer, and the film’s late revelation which proves Randi’s own maxim
that the smarter you are, the easier you can be fooled.

Brooklyn: young women gathered together at the boarding house dinner table;
Julie Walters’ Mrs. Keogh might be the year’s most undervalued performance.

Youth: Gazing, fixed, upon a pop singer on a rotating stage while her
audience swirls around the in the shadows; floating on the incantatory ocean of
“Just” over the end credits; and drop the needle on almost any random moment in
between those two-- there’s another favorite moment. (Read my review here.)

The Forbidden
Room: Maddin favorite Louis Negin instructing his
audience, with delicious insinuation, on how to take a bath-- starting with the
armpits and working slowly down to the genitalia, “in ever-widening circles.”
Oh, and those intertitles!

Mistress America: the extended, scattershot, brilliant farce of a day in the country.

The Man from
U.N.C.L.E.: the unexpected visual wit (from Guy Ritchie!) of a car chase choreographed like an ice-skating duet; the boat chase that speeds past the
windshield of a truck (and our field of vision), inside which Napoleon Solo,
not paying attention to the extended action, regards a purloined sandwich; the
fashion argument between Solo and Kuriyakin; and, really, just about any piece
of clothing any of the actors, but especially Alicia Vikander and Elizabeth
Debecki, have draped on or sculpted to them courtesy of the movie’s brilliantly
observant costume designer, Joanna Johnston.

The Least-Familiar Movie(s) On My List On
Behalf Of Which I Will Happily Proselytize:

There are a couple. First, Guy Maddin’s The
Forbidden Room,a delirious celebration of cinema and storytelling that
rockets way past delirium and into a realm that can barely be described. Jonathan Romney in Film Commentdoes the best job I’ve
read of attempting the task, but I still think there may simply be no combination
of words that will ever suffice. Just see it when you get a chance.

And also,
it’ll take a little effort, but finding your way to Jim Akin’s beguiling
coming-of-age mood piece The Ocean of Helena Lee is one of
the richest favors you can do for yourself in the coming year. Akin is married
to singer Maria Mckee, who has a small role here, and he has fashioned a fresh
take on growing up amidst the seduction of the boundary-free Southern California
lifestyle, filtering his images and sensibility through that of influences as
far-ranging as Fellini, Wenders, the Dardennes Brothers and Brian Wilson, but
coming up with a perspective that feels embryonic, new, exquisitely curious.
(Read my review here.)

Favorite Movie-going Experiences of the Year:

My annual trip to the TCM Classic Film Festival is always big-- 2016
will be year seven of the festival and my seventh time attending. But this year
I have to include taking my daughter to see The
Godfather, Once Upon a Time in the West (our first visit to the New Beverly
Cinema in nearly a year, since Tarantino took the theater over in 2014 and replaced
owner-manager Michael Torgan, who has since returned) and the double bill of Hitchcock/Truffaut and Psycho. I also rediscovered the
avant-garde charm of Robert Altman’s much-maligned Popeye. But the absolute height has to be spending an entire
Saturday afternoon in the presence of the restored Apu Trilogy— Satyajit Ray’s Pather
Panchali, Aparajito and The World of
Apu, one right after the other. Movie bliss doesn’t get much blissier than
that.

Biggest Disappointment of the Year:

Has to be The Hateful Eight.
Once perceived to be enduring a bit of a backlash/referendum based on the
perceived direction of Quentin Tarantino’s career, the backlash now seems to
have reversed in light of the movie’s stronger-than-expected box-office
performance and must-see buzz over its technical presentation. Whatever. It’s
still an ugly, bloated bore.

Least-Favorite Movie of the Year:

There
were a couple of close contenders—low-hanging fruit like the abysmal Pixels and Joe Wright’s misbegotten Pan—but I saw no movie in 2015 more
stillborn than Woody Allen’s Irrational Man.I’ve heard a lot of
people express the sentiment that we should be more tolerant of Allen’s less
successful films and not wait until he’s gone to acknowledge his mastery, a point of view often wielded as a strike against expressing dissatisfaction with Allen’s unstoppable
output. (Bizarrely, I heard the same sort of talk floated in defense of
Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak, as
if to not hold the movie in high regard was akin to a sort of cultural
blindness.) But movies like Irrational
Man make it awfully difficult to prop up this sort of forgiveness. If there’s
anything more dispiriting than the lethargy symptomatic of endlessly recycled themes
and increasing indifference masquerading quasi-European style by which Irrational Man sputters and coughs, I
don’t want to see it. (Read my review here.)

Thanks
to everyone for following this year’s SLIFR Treehouse. But as much as I appreciate that
someone might actually be reading this stuff,I offer my most grateful appreciation
to those fine writers and thinkers who acceded to spend time with me here this
week—Brian Doan, Odie Henderson, Marya Murphy and Phil Dyess-Nugent. It was a
real privilege. As they used to say at the end of the James Bond movies, the
SLIFR Treehouse WILL RETURN! And I hope you all—Brian, Odie, Marya and Phil,
along with everyone who clicked in and read our posts this week-- will consider
doing the same.